


just another night (we've had many of them)

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [107]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Beds are liminal spaces, Bucky trolls the internet, Bucky's total failure to recognize his own massive psychological progress, Disabled Character, M/M, Mentally Ill Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, recovery is a spiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 05:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6040300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe if failing means he gets to have any of this, ever, at all - then maybe he fucking <i>wants</i> to fail. Maybe it's fucking <i>worth it</i>, whatever that makes him. And maybe whatever fucking else is, or ever was, maybe since he made a choice when he was a kid too stupid to even fucking start to grasp what he was deciding . . . maybe since then there's been <i>one</i> good thing he's ever got to have, and maybe it's worth whatever it fucking makes him, keeping it. Getting to keep it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just another night (we've had many of them)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.

There are regular fights in the comments on the instagram feed. Bucky kind of considers this a monument to how far people are willing to go to argue with one another, bait one another and call each other names, because trying to have a conversation on instagram is more work than trying to have one with someone on the other side of a ravine. There's no such thing as a "moderation policy" because he doesn't give that much of a shit, but he does scan through roughly once a day and disappear any comments he doesn't like. 

(Including any whining about how he disappears comments. Or about how he disappears comments whining about disappearing comments. And he is pretty fucking sure that at least one big swathe of that shit he got rid of yesterday was Stark indulging in a bizarre personal variation on the concept of "fun", but it's probably better than accidentally building Skynet so he doesn't bother saying anything.) 

The account is like the online version of sitting on a roof over a busy street and watching people, listening to them. It's a pale, watery, abortive substitute for what part of him thinks it still wants, and then doesn't fucking want, while the rest of him knows it's just a bad fucking idea. It's not that people don't make sense, like he doesn't know them, he does - people are depressingly fucking easy to figure out, still. It's that he's fucked up and turned sideways and _he's_ the wrong note in the song, the dissonance, the . . . what the fuck ever. 

He used to know how to move with other people, around them, among them. Maybe he still even knows. He just can't _do_ it. Knowing doesn't mean shit when it comes to doing. 

If he thinks about that too long, it goes bad places, so instead he fucks around with making his phone's camera actually catch whatever it is about a moment that catches his eye and the internet gets a stream of fucking pictures of an orange cat and cut grass and broken bottles and sometimes Steve. And with the last one they try to project meaning and he sometimes fucks with them when it comes to that, but it's funny too - even when they were both nobody, people did that to Steve. 

Just when they were nobody, the frame was _cripple_ and usually all kinds of mealy-mouthed pseudo-pious bullshit, when it wasn't assholes looking for a target. The general, instead of the specific: Steve as what kind of thing he was, instead of which particular symbol. Trade one kind for the other. Bucky decides it figures. 

The point is, he doesn't know how to be a person anymore, so he just finds ways to watch people instead. The photo-feed just comes with a way to poke them sometimes, see what they'll do. 

This morning he posts a picture of the dead bee on the kitchen windowsill. Then he puts his phone to sleep and tosses it across the coffee table. 

 

Last night he dreamt about putting a gun to a woman's head and pulling the trigger. Handgun. In the dream he knew exactly what it was, what kind, what model but in the waking world what he remembers from the dream makes no sense, like how dreams can have you go through every step of your normal day except one room, one building, it's in the wrong place. And in the dream that makes perfect sense to you, and when you wake up - 

In a way he still keeps waiting for the day _that_ turns out to be the explanation for this. For all of 'this'. For everything. 

For his life now, for being here, for getting to have this. Sometimes it makes more sense, would be easier to believe if that explained it. If that's why he's here, and all of _them_ are dead or hiding somewhere, why Steve's alive and here and . . . everything. If the reasons he thinks he remembers are just the dream putting pieces together and it manages to make sense to him because he's asleep or drugged or something. 

Sometimes it'd be easier to believe; it _always_ makes him want to throw up. 

It's stupid and it's completely fucking unfair, and he's still fucking terrified that it's true. Or that this is all a test, that the reason he can't see that is just he doesn't know what they want and the day is coming when he gets to find out how fucking badly he's failed. And if that sounds crazy, if that doesn't make sense, there's a hiss in the back of his head demanding _since when does anything ever fucking make sense?_

Then there are the days when he's afraid he's made it all up. Everything. 

It's not like he doesn't already know his sick, fucked up brain can throw him that bad. 

Last night he dreamt about putting a gun to a woman's head and he knows it's not a memory because there are too many. Too many women, men, guns, bullets, skulls. So many reasons. It's not assassination most of the time, it's not a _hit_ when it's a fucking housewife dying on the carpet so her husband the minor bureaucrat will take the threat to his kid (and you have his kid, too, of course) seriously enough to do what he's told. 

Too many things like that, in his head. Nothing he can do or think or believe about it that matters. 

 

Last night Steve woke him up. Blocked Bucky from punching him in the head before Bucky figured out where he was. Talked him out of the seconds that stretched after, talked him back into what he can only fucking pray is reality, and that - that's a fucking joke. 

A bleak one. 

And Steve shouldn't have to do that, but fucked if Steve will hear Bucky say it. And if he gives up too easily on trying to make Steve hear, it's because he _wants_ to. Because he wants to give up, and stop, and just let it fucking be. 

Maybe that's the test he's failing, maybe this is what he'll have to pay for but it's too hard to make himself _care_. 

Maybe if failing means he gets to have any of this, ever, at all - then maybe he fucking _wants_ to fail. Maybe it's fucking _worth it_ , whatever that makes him. And maybe whatever fucking else is, or ever was, maybe since he made a choice when he was a kid too stupid to even fucking start to grasp what he was deciding . . . maybe since then there's been _one_ good thing he's ever got to have, and maybe it's worth whatever it fucking makes him, keeping it. Getting to keep it. 

Whatever the fuck it makes him, and however fucking low. 

He's been sitting here, stuck here, in the living-room, for a while. Just sitting here. Sort of thinking that. All of that. 

In his head it's a mess that doesn't want words and really it's just fucking noise to distract himself from the shit smeared underneath. The gun and the woman and knowing _this is what you're for_ and fuck he'd rather think about how crazy he might be, and how much shit he puts Steve through, than think about _that_. While Steve messes around with plants on the deck, screen door open, every now and then loud enough with what he's doing to drag Bucky's thoughts back there. Away from anything else. 

He was a stupid kid when he decided to let his life spin into an orbit around Steve's, but that much he hasn't fucking regretted. That's never been the bad part. Never caused the bad parts, either. He got into all the _shit_ all on his own. 

He still doesn't know what they _are_ , and he never has: they've never fucking fit the spaces anyone has words for, not from the first, not if you look, and now it's only worse and he's got less fucking wool to pull over his own eyes. 

Less of everything - sanity, humanity, illusions, probably soul. Disguises. Less he can hide, even if there's more he wishes he could. Less to give anyone - and he didn't have that much to fucking start with - but especially Steve. 

Just doesn't seem to matter. 

He's been sitting here for too long, half-dressed and half out of his head and here because he could make himself sit down here, sit down on the flattened cushion on top of the flattened frame, in a sideways sliver of the sun that's leaving. Except he dropped back into his own skull and still didn't move. Nothing there to make him, nothing . . . _inside_. His head's as fucking empty as a fucking white page, and maybe right now nothing hurts and nothing's dragging at him, but nothing's there to fill the space, either. Best you can say is _better than it could be_ , damning with praise as faint as it fucking can be. 

_Could be worse_ doesn't mean anything anymore. He could be bleeding out in a hole somewhere and he could _still_ say _could be worse_. Empty blankness doesn't even compete. 

More often than not he thinks this is all that's really left of him. Take away the noise and the crazed, and the grasping at something else that never quite works, and what's left is this. Not so fucking different from what used to sit at the edge of the chair that wiped him clean, and stare at the wall until someone told him what to do. 

So he dropped back into his own head but he still didn't move. So now he's still here and the sun's sliding away from where he's sitting and Jesus, what does he even think he's doing? 

He asks himself that a lot. 

And now Steve's come to sit behind him. 

Bucky still doesn't know what they are. Never has. There's so many fucking words, titles, people think they mean anything and they don't. And if anyone ever had a name for what they are, he never knew it. Most of the ones he does know don't go far enough, or if they do they come with shit clinging to them that doesn't apply. 

There's no fucking word for _the person you're still looking for when there isn't even 'you' anymore._ He probably wouldn't like it if there was, anyway. Doesn't like looking at what it means, the albatross it turns him into. The weight Steve's stuck with around his neck, dragged along and doing nothing. But if he doesn't fucking like it, doesn't make it less true: he doesn't know what they are because there's no fucking word for them, no space anyone else knows. 

Makes it hard to even mark out the shape. 

( _I was lost, and fucked up, and out of my fucking head, I didn't know who or what I fucking was, I didn't know who the fuck you were and I was still looking for you -_ )

(And _Jesus, Steve, I'm sorry, just let me stay, let me have this_ \- ) 

Behind him, Steve moves. He slides closer, puts one hand against Bucky's right shoulder-blade, and Bucky feels brittle and hollow and like if you pushed him over he'd hit the ground and shatter even though you could hit him with a truck and he'd probably fucking have to walk away. He'd have to live. 

When it comes down to it, brittle and hollow are both better than a lot of the ways he feels, a lot of the time. 

His eyes close when Steve brushes his hand up over his shoulder, across the top of his chest to rest against the other side. Steve kisses the back of his head and the top of his shoulder; Bucky reaches back with his other arm, his left arm, to touch the back of Steve's head. 

And he can't say a God-damned thing, but Steve can hear the way his breathing changes, and maybe that's enough.

 

Later, after Steve pulls the quilt that lives out here now half over both of them, they lie there for a while: turned towards each other, close. Bucky's on his left side, left arm stretched up with the flattest pillow between his head and the metal. Steve settles on his right side, head on his hand, and reaches the other over to stroke down the side of Bucky's neck to his right shoulder. 

He runs his palm down Bucky's right arm, over the spot where Bucky took stitches out yesterday, down to Bucky's hand. Then he pulls his hand back up to flatten down Bucky's shoulder-blade to his lower back and pull them closer together. 

Says, "I still love touching you, you know." 

Words like that feel like they slide into Bucky's throat, like they run down the front side of his spine and inside of his ribs, between bone and muscle and lung. It's not them that yanks everything tight, knots everything up, it's like the fucking opposite - like because he wants to let them ease something away, everything else seizes because . . . 

Because who the fuck knows. Because _something_ bad's gonna happen, because some foundation in his fucked up brain is like a panicking kid and won't listen to anything any other part of him has to say. And it still happens, tries to happen now. Because there's still _no_ part of him where that _isn't_ something he wants to hear. Even the shreds of the stupid fucking idiot who used to live in a different Brooklyn and think he knew shit about the world - even him, even though he doesn't even know how to want it or what he wants. Who goes through a lot of sex actually looking for something simpler. More basic. 

Looking for all the little signs that mean someone's thinking _I like touching you_ , and then letting them do it. Christ, people fuck themselves up about this shit. Nobody more than him. 

He tilts his head back, a little, so he can look at Steve's face for a minute, a couple. Watch the flicker of worry as Steve tries to figure out what Bucky's looking for. He's still an idiot. Steve is. But Bucky's tired in a way that has more to do with the inside of his head than anything else, and he can't . . . 

Maybe it's fucking worth failing. It's hard enough trying to fight shit that he wants, sometimes; right now he's not up to fighting that _and_ fighting against shit he knows Steve wants, would want, wants to hear. Even if he fucking shouldn't. 

Bucky flicks his gaze up for a minute and says, "Good." 

He can only take a second of looking at Steve's face after that, looks over at the ceiling, up and over, and adds, "It'd be pretty fucking miserable if you didn't." 

Steve moves his hand. He touches the side of Bucky's face, thumb stroking along his jaw and fingers moving into his hair. And Steve says, "Nice to think about how I get to keep doing it," in a voice he absolutely fucking fails to keep neutral, nonchalant, casual. At all. Bucky catches his forearm but doesn't pull it away. 

"I'm not going anywhere," is what he says, because everything else he can think of to say is telling Steve he's an idiot, and why that shouldn't make him happy, and he doesn't . . . want to. 

Steve slides down the futon, closer to Bucky, resting his head on his arm instead of his hand. He wraps his arm around Bucky's waist and pulls him in, skin to skin, and presses his mouth against the side of Bucky's neck.


End file.
